“That is to say, she is suggesting a comparison (traditional publishing houses vs self-publishing) when she has no numbers with which to make the comparison. There’s no big self-publishing merger that produced lots of public data to crunch. Against the hard numbers that make publishing look bad, she can only pitch broad waves to conditions in self-publishing. That’s because we simply don’t have the necessary information. But it is a certainty that self-publishing follows a Pareto distribution as well. There is no doubt that the vast majority of people trying to make it in self-publishing are failing. There is no doubt that the vast majority working on newsletters will not have the success Griffin has had. Success in creative fields is hard to come by no matter what the model. That’s always been true of the arts! There’s no halcyon days when most artists made a living, and every reason to believe that creators of all types face”
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/publishing-is-designed-to-make-most